Related Stories

R.A. Dickey was ready to make his first throws in a Blue Jays uniform. Just a game of catch. A bit of long-toss on the grass in the outfield.

But, amazingly, catchers had become suspiciously scarce. Weren’t there a couple of the young receivers hanging around just a minute ago? Somebody? Anybody?

“All of a sudden, it was just Dane (Johnson, the club’s minor league pitching instructor) and me,” said manager John Gibbons a bit later.

Johnson drew the short straw. He has caught many a pitcher in his day but never a knuckleballer. On this day, he was brave in the attempt.

For about 10 minutes, Johnson danced and deked and dove almost like the nasty, spinless orb he was trying to catch. “You can’t lose focus, not for a second,” he said.

In the end, he got the ultimate compliment from Dickey.

“I’m just meeting a lot of people for the first time today and they say (Johnson’s) nickname is ‘The Total Package’ and I’d have to say that’s one thing he does well,” said Dickey. “I don’t know yet about the total package, but he does the knuckleball package pretty well.”

So does Dickey. Six years after embarking on a voyage of discovery, trying to harness a pitch that few can throw and even fewer can control, Dickey won a Cy Young Award in 2012 and now brings his magic act to Toronto.

“I can say it’s been a difficult, arduous journey, but at the same, time really rewarding,” he said. “My hope is to continue to grow at my craft and what I do. Hopefully, I’ll be able to present that in a consistent way on the field time after time.”

Change, often nasty and abrupt, has been the only constant in R.A. Dickey’s life. He survived his formative years despite an alcoholic mother and an unreachable father, as well as episodes of sexual abuse. He was a baseball star in college, a power pitcher who earned a first-round selection and a big bonus from the Texas Rangers only to have it all taken away when it was discovered he was born without an ulnar collateral tendon in his pitching elbow.

He wallowed in the Texas chain until 2006 when, at the urging of Buck Showalter and Orel Hershiser, he embraced the task of learning the knuckleball. Seven years and eight teams (five in the minors, three in the majors), he finds himself the anchor of what looks to be one of the best starting rotations in the game.

He’ll take that assessment with a grain of salt.

“For me and the way my narrative has been, there’s always something to prove,” he said. “I never want to pitch in a game thinking that I could have had more intensity, better effort, more preparation. My motivation is to be a complete player, over and over again. If I can condense that down to how I can be in the moment, every moment, then I think I’ll end up where I want to be.

“It’s an opportunity for us to put our stake in the sand, so to speak, as a staff. We have the names and the pedigree to be able to do that. We’ll all see it as a disappointment if we can’t carry this club. We’re not always going to be able to carry the club because it’s the AL East and a tough division. We’re not perfect. Hopefully the offence will carry us when we can’t pitch as well as we hope.”

Obviously, the knuckleball sets Dickey apart from other pitchers. In addition to that, Dickey’s velocity sets him apart from other knuckleballers. He can throw the pitch, on average, about 10 m.p.h. faster than the knucklers we’ve known in the recent past, Such as Tim Wakefield, Tom Candiotti and the Niekro brothers, reducing the reaction time a hitter has to make an adjustment.

“What the pitch inherently brings is uncertainty,” he said.

“Uncertainty in that the hitter can’t predict where the ball is going to be because it moves very late. The one thing a knuckleball does do is it makes a hitter make an adjustment they wouldn’t ordinarily make. That can sometimes set a hitter back. I will tell you that relievers coming in behind me traditionally have pretty good success because a hitter, for three or four at-bats, has had to face the knuckleball.”

With success coming at what would be such a late stage of a conventional baseball career, there have been some (not many) raised eyebrows at the Jays’ bestowing a three-year contract (and the possibility of a fourth) on a 38-year-old pitcher. Dickey has no misgivings.

“I feel like my body is able to pitch well into my 40s. I’m 38 now and that’s like, what, 29 in knuckleball years? Like the reverse of dog years?

“Truth is, I don’t want to put a ceiling on it. I want to be present with my teammates and my pitch and what I do and my craft. If I start projecting out, it somehow steals something away from the present.

“We’ll see. It might be another 10 years, it might be another four. I’ve got a three-year contract with an option that I plan on fulfilling, so we’ll see after that.”